Good news! Aaron Miller, BookGlutton’s CTO (@vaporbook), has open-sourced the BookGlutton Core Epub Library. This is something that people can use in web-based reading systems, and we hope other developers will use and improve it as a basis for creating Epub 3 workflows.

WHAT DOES IT DO?
The Core Epub Library is what powers the BookGlutton converter, as well as much of the book content on the site. It is a self-contained library meant as a server-side component in an Epub content management system, with a special extension to allow for virtual zip containers (without writing files to disk).

The Core Epub Library can be used in conjunction with the previously announced Epub Framework which is a set of command-line tools for viewing and creating Epub files.

WHY IS THIS GOOD?

The BookGlutton Core Epub Library is in PHP, so people now have an alternative to existing libraries, most of which are not written for PHP.

It is the most robust PHP library for working with Epub files – it’s been used in production on a live bookstore and publishing platform for several years, so it has a lot of useful and stable features.

You can use this to allow a system to modify an Epub file or read metadata from it with just a few lines of code; and of course, you can use it to do conversions or even build new Epubs from scratch.

It can be used as reliable a back end to WordPress systems which need to utilize Epub files as part of a content workflow.

FINAL WORD
This is part of a suite of tools Aaron Miller is open-sourcing to drive Epub creation and innovation. We’re hoping to get other developers involved so that we can use the BookGlutton Core Epub Library as a foundation as we all move toward Epub 3!